


either/or

by butiamhome



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-04 18:56:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5344892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butiamhome/pseuds/butiamhome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, Bitty feels like a mess of contradictions, the most worrying being that he’s been blessed with being both southern and gay. <i>Lord,</i> he thinks, <i>if you had to make me one, could you have spared me the other? </i></p>
<p>Or, Eric Bittle's complicated feelings about being both southern and gay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	either/or

Sometimes, Bitty feels like a mess of contradictions, the most worrying that he’s been blessed with being both southern and gay. _Lord_ , he thinks, _if you had to make me one, could you have spared me the other?_

The thing about being southern is, Bitty never really feels it till he’s up north, playing ice hockey with a bunch of Yankees and Canadians.

But it’s inescapable. He spent a full day before he left for Samwell trying to get rid of his accent, and it still sticks. (As if you could change eighteen years’ worth of speech patterns in one afternoon, bless his heart.) Every “goodness gracious” and “sweet Mary” makes him feel more like a bad imitation of Scarlett O’Hara, but it’s just part of his natural dialect. People seem to find it charming and chirpworthy in turns—”y’all’d’ve” blows their damn minds.

He’s at least somewhat proud of his innate politeness, though. He should be used to it by now, but he’s a little astonished every time he hears any of the team talk to their parents without so much as a “no, sir,” or “yes, ma’am.” Bitty’s mama didn’t raise him to talk to adults like that, with a “chyeah,” or even worse, anything that’d come out of Shitty’s mouth. (God love him, Lord knows he has his reasons, but the boy’s normal dialogue is practically a blue streak.)

They think it’s weird that he still calls his mother “Mama,” and even weirder when he refers to Coach as—well, as Coach. But it’s not like he knows another way to be. If he’d showed any less respect than that growing up, he’d have been spanked with his mama’s wooden spoon, and he hated to see that spoon used for anything other than stirring a hot pitcher of sweet tea.

It’s not like the boys know another way, either, so it’s really not anyone’s fault! Bitty doesn’t judge them so much as keep reminding himself that everyone’s raised differently, and not everyone shows respect in the ways he’s been taught. But he can’t help the little internal flinch every time, and sometimes? Sometimes he feels plain guilty for it.

And then there’s the trips down south to Georgia. He never feels less southern than he does there, and never more like an outsider.

At first it was just the figure skating, curling up and crying at the first tackle in peewee football (which Coach still don’t like to talk about), and spending more time with his mama in the kitchen than with the other kids his age. Bitty never wanted to go fishing, hunting, or to gun shows, and his extended family never really quite knew what to do with him.

A few years down the line, and Bitty had a word for himself: gay. (The boys at school had a different word for it when he’d show up Monday mornings with glitter still stuck to his face from weekend competitions, but they rarely even whispered it. Football boys know better’n that; football boys don’t want to run extra laps after talking shit about the coach’s son.)

It’s not like Bitty feels any extra gay down south, but he feels more...well, a little more paranoid about it. Samwell’s got the “one in four, maybe more” line, and everyone’s been really accepting of him, but Georgia—at least his part of Georgia—leans much more “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and Bitty’s spent most of his life under that law.

If there’s one thing Bitty’s ashamed of, it’s not being gay—it’s hiding it. But when he’s real honest with himself, deep down, he’s scared half to death of what it means for him, to be gay and southern.

Sometimes he feels near split in two, like he can’t be both at the same time. When he’s in Georgia, he feels like he has to dial himself down some, keep smiling and baking like he’s not at least a little worried someone’s gonna find him out. He can’t quite tell his mama, he can’t begin to tell Coach, and he doesn’t really have friends left from high school he could even hang out with. When he’s in Massachusetts, he feels like he’s being fake somehow, like southern isn’t a thing he’s allowed to claim in the same time and space as his gayness.

In a perfect world, he would feel able to be his full self, both halves whole in both the places he calls home. He’s an optimist at heart, Bitty is, and he feels like he's getting there—after all, gay marriage is legal in every state now, that’s got to be a start, right? And people are getting more tolerant, if not accepting, and his mama is willing to at least talk about his great-aunt Joann and her “friend” Lucy now, which is good!

But it’s just not that easy for him, not yet. He’s tried talking to Shitty about it—Shitty understands a heck of a lot of stuff other people might not—but it’s just so hard to put into words. How can he stay true to one without betraying the other? He’s tried to tamp one down and turn one up, and it never works, at least not comfortably. He’s gone eighteen years and some change pretending—well, not to not be gay, exactly, but to be sort of neutral about attraction to anyone at all. It’s starting to make his skin itch, like he’s not fitting in it just right anymore. And he can pretend all he wants that he’s not from the south, but Lord knows the second that child opens his mouth, he’ll show his true colors.

When he gets too stressed out about it, he bakes. Pies don’t ask any complicated questions; Betsy doesn’t require him to explain his whole identity before preheating. And, he thinks, if there are three words to describe him, baker might come before gay or southern.

So he pulls out his mama’s hand-me-down Southern Living cookbooks and turns up the Beyonce and bakes, because what else is a boy to do? Rolling out dough and crimping crusts is just—if he has a safe space, if there’s somewhere he can truly, wholly be himself, no questions asked, he reckons it’s the Haus kitchen.

And that’s at least something.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading this! I hope you liked it. I have complicated feelings about being southern myself, so I really wanted to write about Bitty's. 
> 
> Thanks to @shakespeareandpunk for always talking about her own complicated southern feelings, and to @misandrywitch for also inspiring this fic and saying nice things about it! And, as always, to the H-E-DOUBLE-HOCKEY-STICKS group text.


End file.
